Keller

'When you have a society organised in such a way that those at the top benefit from the labour of the majority, you have some strong incentives to develop the kind of selfhood that gets you there. The only kind of selfhood that gets you there is the kind of selfhood that allows you to numb your empathies. To maintain the system of dominance, it’s crucial that the elite learns this empathic numbness, akin to what Robert Jay Lifton calls ‘psychic numbing,’ so that its members can control and when necessary torture and kill without being undone. If its members are incapable of numbing, or if they have not been trained properly, the system of domination will collapse.'

Catherine Keller